


Like Love to Hatred Turned

by Lassarina



Category: Magna Carta: Tears of Blood
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-17
Updated: 2017-12-17
Packaged: 2019-02-16 06:25:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,196
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13048344
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lassarina/pseuds/Lassarina
Summary: "Heaven hath no rage like love to hatred turned." Calintz, after Lake Astine, and the betrayals that make up his life.(Spoilers through endgame)





	Like Love to Hatred Turned

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Rose Argent (roseargent)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/roseargent/gifts).



_I thank you for your loyalty and hard work,_ Agreian—Hugo—no, _Neikan_ —had said.

Calintz gave the tree stump beneath him a desultory poke with the tip of his dagger. Neikan's dagger. The price of his birthright, though he hadn't known it at the time. How had Neikan known? They'd been mere children. Neikan could not have come up with that plan all by himself, not then.

Or was he just making excuses? All his life, he'd been blind to Neikan's manipulation, starting when they were children. But just because he hadn't seen through the plan didn't mean there hadn't been one. Perhaps it had started as merely a cruel lark, to put a Yason in the place of the Great Priestess's lost son. It had grown to encompass a horror that Calintz could scarcely conceive.

Yesterday, he had been a mercenary, desperate to end the war and protect Reith, confident in Agreian's friendship and his place in the world.

Reith was dead protecting him from Neikan—had been a Yason all along, and he wondered if Neikan had known that when he encouraged their romance—and Neikan had torn away all the layers of illusion he had so carefully crafted over the years.

How many times had Neikan told him that he was too valuable to lose, even as the Tears of Blood were sent on ever more dangerous missions?

How many times had Neikan invited him to his bed, telling him over and over again how important he was, how much his friendship and loyalty meant?

Calintz couldn't count them.

He closed his hand tight around the fragment of Amila's mask, and dispassionately watched blood well in his palm where the razor edge had cut. He'd shed blood for Neikan, had left Lehas to die at the hands of soldiers Neikan commanded. He'd been imprisoned and beaten as a spy. _For a while I suspected you,_ Neikan had confided after Calintz was freed.

The irony was awful. All that time, Neikan had let him take the blame, while hunting for the so-called spy.

He could count back over the years, every time Neikan had betrayed him. It had never looked like betrayal at the time, only consideration, trust, and love.

He'd loved Hugo and Reith very differently, and they had both betrayed him. He squeezed the fragment again, felt it dig deep into his flesh, watched blood trickle down his wrist and drip into the little pool of water soaking his feet. He hadn't moved from where Reith—Amila—had fallen. He didn't see the point.

He heard voices. Familiar ones. The Tears of Blood had come looking for him, which was far more than he deserved. He'd left the best of them to die and abused the others in pursuit of revenge, when all the while his target had been right under his nose.

Azel tried to cajole. Haren tried harsh words. None of them mattered.

He'd promised he would protect her, and instead, she had died protecting him—from Neikan.

He turned the fragment compulsively in his fingers, tracing all its ragged edges, finding every sharp line. Masks, everything was masks. He had been the only one to wear his heart openly, and both of them had taken advantage.

_Does it make you feel better to put the blame on others?_ Amila had asked him, before that last fight.

Had she known? Had her amnesia been false? He didn't think so, but he was apparently very good at not knowing what he did not want to know. He touched the gleaming surface of the mask, and left a bloody fingerprint, as he had done to everything he touched.

He hated her for her betrayal, but it was nothing to what he felt for Neikan. Yet every time he tried to think of Reith's face, it was Amila's beneath the mask, the frozen Queen of the Yason who had halted the Forbidden Magic and lost herself doing it.

Maybe Reith was who Amila had always wanted to be, the better woman under the mask. Power changed a person. Neikan was proof of that. Neikan was putrid.

How could they both have betrayed him? How could he have loved a Yason? How could she have lied to him?

He dropped his face into his hands, pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes until his vision went sparkling-bright inside the darkness. Was that the point, all along? Not everything was as it seemed. Were the Yason all really so bad? If more of them were like Amila, maybe the war could end.

Neikan would end it with the Light of Salvation, that much was true, but not the way Calintz had thought he would. And humans had no one like Amila, to defend them against a forbidden power that should never be unleashed.

That, he thought, was the difference. Reith had understood sacrifice. She had reached out in friendship to both humans and Yason.

Neikan only extended bloody grasping claws to rend and tear.

The voices had retreated; they were leaving him here.

Good.

He had only one place left to go.

He dragged himself to his feet, feeling the burning remnants of the wounds Amila had inflicted. When he was alone, the monsters of the marsh were too much of a challenge, so he crept along carefully, trying to see them before they could see him. One foot in front of the other, squishing with cold dampness from too long hunched over, trapped in the circle of his thoughts. One step, then another, to the beat of his swirling thoughts. Betrayal. Love. Loss. War. Death. Betrayal. Lies. Reith. Neikan. Yason. Death. Fuget. Betrayal.

It all came back to betrayal.

He didn't remember most of the journey, lost in memories of Neikan's lies and all the things he should have seen about Reith, but he found himself in the ruins of Fuget. He'd met Hugo here. He'd traded away the birthright he hadn't remembered.

He heard the scrape of steel, and drew his own before he realized it. The soldiers were nothing, Neikan's tools, but the phoenix that came to his rescue made short work of them.

In its cry, he heard Reith's voice.

Something in him snapped, and he lunged at it, hacking frantically through a mist of memory and betrayal, fighting the thing that spoke with her voice and mocked him with her laugh. He remembered, then, the girls he'd played with here in Fuget—what had a Yason child been doing in an orphanage town? More, a Yason princess? He couldn't remember why, but he knew she had been. She had taught him to fight Hugo.

The phoenix flew through him, and just as long ago her words had told him how to defeat his friend, now her familiar showed him how to defeat his enemy.

It had come full circle.

Calintz sheathed his sword and started toward the Lester Woods, back where it had begun. He hadn't saved Reith, but she'd saved him.

He intended to use her gift well.

_You'll be the death of me, you know,_ Neikan had told him in Lester.

A single shining truth.


End file.
